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serves the functional purpose of facilitating trade but performs the sym-bolic or ritualistic purpose of consolidating the internal bonds, the col-lective identity, of each clan differe

serves the functional purpose of facilitating trade but performs the sym-bolic or ritualistic purpose of consolidating the internal bonds, the

col-lective identity, of each clan differentiated through the act.5 In other words, the bride functions as a relational term between groups of men;

she does not have an identity, and neither does she exchange one

identi-ty for another She reflects masculine identiidenti-ty precisely through being

the site of its absence Clan members, invariably male, invoke the pre-rogative of identity through marriage, a repeated act of symbolic differ-entiation Exogamy distinguishes and binds patronymically specific kinds of men Patrilineality is secured through the ritualistic expulsion

of women and, reciprocally, the ritualistic importation of women As

wives, women not only secure the reproduction of the name (the

func-tional purpose), but effect a symbolic intercourse between clans of men As the site of a patronymic exchange, women are and are not the patronymic sign, excluded from the signifier, the very patronym they bear The woman in marriage qualifies not as an identity, but only as a relational term that both distinguishes and binds the various clans to a common but internally differentiated patrilineal identity

The structural systematicity of Lévi-Strauss’s explanation of kin-ship relations appeals to a universal logic that appears to structure

human relations Although Lévi-Strauss reports in Tristes tropiques that

he left philosophy because anthropology provided a more concrete cultural texture to the analysis of human life, he nevertheless assimi-lates that cultural texture to a totalizing logical structure that effec-tively returns his analyses to the decontextualized philosophical structures he purported to leave Although a number of questions can

be raised about the presumptions of universality in Lévi-Strauss’s work

(as they are in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s Local Knowledge), the

questions here concern the place of identitarian assumptions in this universal logic and the relationship of that identitarian logic to the sub-ordinate status of women within the cultural reality that this logic describes If the symbolic nature of exchange is its universally human character as well, and if that universal structure distributes “identity”

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